My mom pressed her best dress, sky blue—azure, she said—and sat near the front, clapping and clapping, her eyes bright as streamers.

Almost like she was trying too hard.

It was Senior Achievement Night, and I’d already stepped onto the stage four times—for chem honors, for calculus, for National Honor Society, for the yearbook.

Each time I set my jelly sandals—the same ones my mom threatened to throw into the bushes after my wayward night with Lou and Jimmy and all the beers—onto the shiny wood lip of the stage, I felt sure it would be the end. I can’t explain it. I felt sure that it would be the end of me. Some catastrophe unguessed, some pig-blood prank gone to red mayhem. But it just kept going.

“Class salutatorian,” cheered Principal Oaks, and that was a special one indeed. There was so much clapping I could barely hear my mom’s whistling cheer.

Grave and striking in a long lace dress and pearls against her neck, Diane followed me onto the stage as class valedictorian. She’d already been up there for six, seven, eight other honors, each time returning to a seat beside her grandfather, looking frail in a checked blazer that hung on him, his shirt pressed like for church.

By the time she took the certificate in her long hands, the audience was on its feet. All the clappers seemed to feel this was the climax of a gripping and moving story in which they had played some part.

Settling back in the worn velveteen seat, I watched. Her tasteful pumps, her empty eyes, the shine of her hair, the way she walked, like something unreal and untouchable. Even my mom, fingers looped in mine, seemed to have a choke in her throat somewhere for Diane.

Because—and this was the first time I understood this—everyone always likes the best, wants the most, admires deeply, the girl who’s just out of reach. The girl no one can touch, really. We don’t know why we’re drawn, but it’s unstoppable.

I could see it in their faces: This lovely young girl, so modest and sweet, arrived newly to our town just nine months ago and look what she has done, and we are somehow a part of it. We’ve given her this. Ah, our special girl.

“Congratulations, young lady.” It was Diane’s grandfather, frailer still up close, that blazer of paper-soft linen flapping off his frame. “Diane speaks very highly of you.”

He bent slightly at the waist to shake my hand, like an old-time gentleman.

“We’re lab partners,” I said, feeling myself sweating under my dress. Wishing my mom would get back from the ladies’ room. “And we both run cross-country.”

A flash of recognition in his watery blue eyes; he said he’d seen me running before, out by the highway.

“And just what are you running from, young miss?” he said, winking.

Suddenly, I was laughing, even though I wasn’t sure why exactly.

“And do you know where you’ll go to college?” he asked. “You must have your pick.”

It was all so normal, and I just started talking about how it’d probably be City Tech right here in Lanister, but they had a Podunk chemistry lab with no gas chromatograph and no spectrophotometer.

“Well,” he said, “I bet your mama would like to keep you close.”

“Maybe that’s what I’m running from,” I said, laughing nervously at my own dumb joke.

But Mr. Fleming matched me full-throatedly, as if I were very charming.

And then, before I could stop myself, I kept going, talking about how Diane and I were both waiting to hear about the Severin scholarship, and that would mean I could go to State, and they had a great cross-country team there too.

“Diane’s better than me, though,” I added.

As if on cue, over his shoulder, I saw Diane approaching us slowly, cautiously.

“At running or science?” he asked, reaching his arm out for Diane.

My eyes on Diane, I lost my words in an instant.

“Two marathoners, either way,” he decided, smiling. Diane’s eyes on me.

“Well,” I said, backing away. “I gotta go.” This, I thought to myself, I cannot do. To stand here with Diane and the father of the father she killed. This I cannot do.

“And you, Diane?” he said, turning to his granddaughter with a grin. “What are you running from?”

Diane looked at me, then looked away.

At the reception, Principal Oaks, who’d never said a word to me in four years, pinched my cheeks like you might a prize pig, and Ms. Steen pulled me into a freesia-scented embrace, and Jed Malinkowski, the bushy-haired yearbook editor I kissed once at a ninth-grade party, our foreheads banging, making me see stars, whispered in my ear: A genius with dimples like cut glass. And I felt like a star, a special person for the first time. Back then I knew so little.

“Mrs. Owens,” Ms. Castro said, “watching Kit bloom this year has been a great joy. We always knew she had it in her.”

My mom nodded, smiled, unable to speak, brushing the bangs from my face with trembling fingers.

“And I never said this,” Ms. Castro adds, leaning close to my mom, voice low, “but I hope she gets the Severin.”

After, we sat in the car for a long time, both of us breathing hard, ragged.

“I didn’t really know until tonight,” my mom said finally.

“What?”

“How it was. Is. How you are. What you can do.”

“Mom,” I said, hand out, because I didn’t want her to cry.

“Listen to me, honey.” But she wasn’t looking at me and her jaw was set, locked. “You listen to what I’m going to say now.”

“Mom.”

“You must do for you, okay? That’s what matters here. You must do everything you need to for you.”

I knew then that even though she couldn’t know what Diane had done, she knew what it all meant, Ms. Castro buzzing in her ear all night.

I didn’t say anything. She turned to me, her face dark in the dark car.

“Do you promise me?”

“Okay, Mom.”

She made me say it again, and then one more time.

“You’re going to be fighting your whole life,” she said. “You have to take the chances you’ve got.”

And we were both crying by then, her hands damp on the steering wheel, yet both of us stronger than we had ever been before. Or would be again.